Open folders in a convenient way

In Visual Studio 2017, Microsoft has provided a convenient way to work with the code base. You can now directly open a folder instead of opening the solution/project explicitly. When you open a folder, you can easily navigate to all files by structural folders using the Solution Explorer. Not only this, but you can also build your projects from the Solution Explorer; right-click on context menu.

In order to open a folder, you can click on File | Open | Folder... from the Visual Studio menu or the Open Folder link present on the Start Page. Alternatively, you can press the keyboard shortcut: Ctrl + Shift + Alt + O:

The folder view also supports the following:

• Searching across the code in your folder with the Go To (Ctrl + ,) command.
• Scoping the Solution Explorer folder view to subfolders. To scope your current context to a specific project/folder, right click on it and then click on Scope To This from the context menu.
• Opening folders in Explorer or the Command Prompt from the Solution Explorer itself.
• Easily toggle between solutions with the Solution selection dropdown.
• Configuring the debug and launch settings with launch.json. Right-click on a debuggable file and select Debug and Launch Settings.
• Configuring tasks and customizing the build with tasks.json. Right-click on any file and select Configure Task Settings.
• Launch.vs.json and tasks.vs.json have IntelliSense in the JSON editor.
• Integration with supported source control repositories. This will provide you the current status of the file. As shown in the following screenshot, a + or a tick mark provides you the status of the local file in comparison with the version available in source control repository:

You can also open a folder from the Windows Explorer window by right-clicking on any folder and then clicking the Open in Visual Studio context menu item, as shown in the following screenshot: